Outrage surged again a week ago, when Maureen Dowd of the New York Times reported on her visit with Macpherson, who told her that newspapers are in "a General Motors moment" and that his website could become a prototype for the future.

This might all seem terribly threatening to a knuckle-walking, retrograde print reporter like me, if I hadn't spent a little time with the Internet publisher and taken a spin through Pasadena Now.

What I found was a small businessman struggling to make a dollar, and a bright, glossy website mostly preoccupied with society happenings, ribbon-cuttings, fundraisers, the arts and, one day this week, gingerbread houses made by local schoolchildren.